Science & Technology

If asked 'what is the least proletarian profession?', many might place ‘video game designer’ pretty close to the top. Until quite recently, that opinion might well have been shared by a majority of game designers themselves. But now this is changing rapidly. A snowballing of awareness is taking place about the extreme exploitation that the video games industry is based upon.

We previously published a review of The Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – And the Unexpected Solutions, a book by Swiss-British writer and journalist Johann Hari, in which he attempts to re-examine the way that society views depression. However, while Hari raises some valid criticisms, his critique ends up being exaggerated and one-sided.

This article, written for Socialist Appeal, was published a matter of days before Bitcoin's value collapsed by half overnight. This catastrophic downturn proves everything we have written about Bitcoin and how it reflects of the general crisis of capitalism.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer will stop research on Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease, and is expected to lay-off 300 research and development staff in Massachusetts and Connecticut, in a move that could severely hamper progress towards effective treatments for these illnesses – proving that critical medical research cannot be left in the hands of capitalist profiteers. Corporations like Pfizer should be expropriated and their assets, data and equipment placed under democratic control, to be used for the betterment of mankind.

In archaeology, new evidence and the resulting explanations have come to resemble the conclusions that Marxists reached long ago in explaining how dialectical materialism corresponds to the natural world.

This weekend has seen a massive cyberattack against large corporations and public institutions. Negligence on the part of governments and companies allowed hackers to encrypt data on hundreds of thousands of computers based on tools developed by US security NSA.

Since the 1930s a dominant trend has existed within the scientific community and popular science that explains quantum mechanics with all kinds of idealistic and mystical interpretations. Dominant within this school of idealism has been the “Copenhagen interpretation” of quantum mechanics, which originated with academics such as Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg who were based in the Danish capital.

On June 23, 1905, Orville Wright became the first person to successfully fly a powered aircraft. Just 56 years later, in April 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person in space, when Vostok 1 made a successful orbit of the Earth. Flight, and later space travel, were viewed as an indication of humanity’s progress and ability to overcome even the most enormous of obstacles, in this case, the Earth’s gravitational pull. But the recent explosion of Orbital Sciences Corporation’s Antares rocket on October 28, and the explosion of Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo just a few days later seem to highlight the primary obstacle in the way of humanity’s development today: the private ownership of the means of production.

The various unsolved mysteries in physics described above are no secret. The scientific community is fully aware of the challenges they face. The search for the solution to these problems has yielded many candidates, none of which can yet claim victory. What is remarkable, however, is just how little the field of cosmology has advanced in the last few decades.

The other three main pillars of cosmology– quantum mechanics, the SMPP, and general relativity – are not without glaring problems. In most cases, these are of a more theoretical, dare it be said, philosophical nature.

Since the dawn of civilisation, humans have questioned the workings of the natural world around them and their own place in the Universe. Through a long process of investigation over millennia, mankind has built up an understanding of Nature and the wider cosmos. Each successive generation has expanded the horizon of our knowledge and in the process extended the boundary of the known Universe. From Ptolemy and Copernicus and through to the modern day, at every stage scientific discoveries have refined and redefined our picture of the Cosmos and our place within it.